An EFL blogger wrote about the following incident. It doesn’t surprise me. If anything, what surprises me is the naivety of not predicting this kind of thing abosolutely will happen, 100% guaranteed:
On Saturday there was an article published in el Pais about
a student who has been find 400 Euros (200 acording to the electronic edition of the newspaper) because of a comment published on his blog:Ivan Fresneda wrote about his college, saying that it was incoherent and bsurd, complaining about the lack of newspapers in his school, and was extremely critical of the methodology of his Philosophy teacher.
Now Ivan has been taken to court and fined because of threats to the
Philosophy teacher that were published in the comments section of this blog post. Although the comments were published anonymously, Ivan has been held responsible because it is his blog, and he should have let the comment be published.Obviously, this has repercussions for bloggers everywhere, who could potentially be held responsible for comments published anonymously on their blogs, and is also related to the cyber-bullying incident I wrote about recently
At the very least, we need to ensure that comments on student blogs are moderated before they are published, and now it’s not just because of potential spam!